After a week of poking around English fishing villages we spent our last night in London immersed in the English fishing village the English National Opera created for their production of Peter Grimes.
The difference was that the villages we visited were delightful; the ENO’s was completely horrifying. The village populace was the villain of the piece, a mob ready to believe anything bad about their neighbors and eager for any excuse to be violent. The production employed a huge chorus—at times the stage was entirely filled with people (like the mob scenes in Metropolis or M), with an appropriately oppressive effect.
And
because we were seeing it at the Coliseum rather than some giant modern barn,
instead of a big operatic spectacle it was an intimate, dramatic event. And so
we were able to appreciate the acting as well as the singing of Stuart Skelton
(Grimes), Amanda Roocroft (Ellen), Gerald Finley (the Captain), and everybody
else. The orchestra under Edward Gardener was incisively dramatic—the
instrumental interludes became an integral part of the drama.
What a strange opera! The music is accessible, with moments that stun—the quartet of Ellen, Auntie and her neices, the raucous Moot Hall dance—but it’s not light entertainment. The text merely toys with the idea of being a mystery, but ambles off into often opaque tableaux. The hero is a vision-haunted madman--I don’t recall encountering any Wozzecks during our ramble around Penwith peninsula. It’s the anti-Fidelio, warning us all how eager we are to be misled.
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